Game – Assassins Creed: Odyssey [Base Game]
Time to 100%* (more details later) base game – 95 hours
RNG Critique:
To get started the game is huge and strives for quite a bit. Luckily for the most part it reaches the heights strived for. The map alone from top corner to bottom is over 15,000m with going from the bottom left to top right well over 20k. The world is absolutely huge, but it is surprisingly filled and packed quite a bit full of various things such as tasks one can do.
To get the main complaints and negative parts of the game out of the way let’s start with the bows. AC: Origins I believe has them spot on in this aspect. There was a wide variety of bows with each having a specific use case. Now we are limited to one with abilities that are supposed to replace what a dedicated bow otherwise would have been for. Both the aiming and the way it feels while using it are subpar in comparison. It is still solid but when they have a better alternative you must think why not use it.
Another aspect that origins had done better was crafting and upgradability with your character. There were several upgrades for either max bow capacity, health, stealth damage ect. Some may think the farming of materials was tedious and not worth the effort but in my opinion, it added to the game as you slowly completed the game in its entirety. If a person didn’t want to or wasn’t bothered to do said farming they were not forced to as they could still complete the game without it. In Origins I was easily able to beat the game without focusing on farming resources for upgrades and only had to do marginal amounts post-game. Even after though it was not a major focus as clearing the map and collecting the required materials was easy enough that you didn’t really think about it.
Ships had been done ok, but major amounts of room for improvement here in both upgradability to more sea life adventure focus with a wider variety of events that should be there but are absent in the current build. In this aspect Black flag has accomplished what this game lacked.
There is also armor customization, with the newest update I believe it was v1.05 they added the ability to change the appearance of any piece of armor to another given you had found it in the past. Having that added in helped a lot for quality of life in that you don’t have to hope RNG blesses you with the perfect drop and style. Once you have the drop stats you desire, change the design to the one you prefer, and you are good to go. A major overlooked area is armor sets. Each armor set and Epic tier of equipment has 3 primary stats and a set bonus that is only applied once all 5 pieces are assembled. The problem here is that legendary gear you can engrave a skill onto the piece of armor… including any set bonus obtained. Epic gear only has 2 stats given per piece and can engrave a 3rd and once the set is assembled given its set bonus. Overall this means an epic set has a max potential of granting 13 boosts. Sounds great until you look at legendary gear which has marginal def drop and can be remedied by engraving a def increase onto it. Legendary has a base of 3 stats per piece and can be engraved making its max potential up to 16 boosts. If a person is worried about armor that would bring it down to 15 boosts after an armor enhancement is applied which will make the set even stronger than its epic counterparts. Making things worse is the fact that you can directly apply any set bonus onto the armor further making epic sets more useless once you unlock its bonus.
Epic gear took quite a loss and could be easily remedied by having it the same as legendary gear with its 4 primary boosts and 1 engravement slot. But on top of that allow the said set bonus that way its max potential is 1 more boost at 17 when fully equipped.
The Main Game:
What I liked most about this game is probably how it wasn’t necessarily story focused but more of the journey your character took across the land and sea. You play as a mercenary and it truly does feel like it. I read several complaints about how the quests felt the same and the main thing to say about that is they are wrong… sort of. The repeatable quests which are clearly marked in black and white are yes repetitive and tedious, but the actual story and side quests had a fair amount of variety and could have been done better but dialog and interactions with others felt just fine. A lot of people that complained about the quests I feel had not read the map properly to see what ones are repeatable since in any game repeatable quests will feel the same and have a very simplistic nature about them as they need to be. Any repeatable quest is simple mainly since its RNG’d and not procedurally generated with random dialog between the npc and you the player. It’s impossible to have truly varied repeatable quests.
They drop you into the game and don’t hold your hand, you are free to do anything you feel. As time goes on you forget you are in the animus then at a certain event you are taken out and you then realize “Ya, I’m not there for fun, the modern-day storyline has a reason we are diving right now.”. For how they have it setup though it is great since the outbound story so far has been nonexistent. I would say bad but there isn’t enough information or details given to make proper judgement. It has potential but almost anything that has little to no details but a cool theme you could say that about.
Throughout the game there are some creatures you can hunt called legendary beasts. Hardest fight is the second boar by far, you’ll know the one I’m talking about if it shits a poisonous cloud on the battlefield that won’t go away the entire duration of the fight. Its moves are so unpredictable for when to dodge efficiently. Forget about countering, it won’t let you and I’m pretty sure its immune unless I did something severely wrong. I was at this fight for about a half hour of getting a hair away from defeat but then desynced. Mind you I had not upgraded or crafted gear in any way at this point. After getting abused by this guy I did go and craft… what a difference when I put 45% animal bonus damage stacked with 4% increase crit chance and other bonuses. Went back and beat it within 30 seconds lol. The moment I beat it I felt so happy. Then proceeded to hunt the other legendary beasts left. When I fought the other one and it went down that quickly I upped the difficulty to hard and I felt that had a good balance for where my character was. It would take, given enemy is the same level, 3-4 hits to kill me (higher tier enemies it was down to 2-3). This allowed for a mistake or 2 before healing ability could kick in but not too easy where I couldn’t die since I had to focus just a tad to dodge properly. Played the rest of the game on hard after this point.
Legendary bests were a onetime event that once killed I don’t believe respawned even after a certain amount of time but could be wrong as I never went back to check on their locations later on after I killed them all. Each of the legendary beasts was fun to find and take down although if you spec your character a certain way become laughably easy and clearly not how they should have been fought.
The world is sectioned off into major territories that is either captured by Sparta or Athens. Each territory can be flipped by triggering a special event where you either fight for Athens or Sparta. One side is holding the territory and the other is helping said side take it over. If you win the fight to take it over then you have then converted the place to the opposite side. Nothing really special happens though but is helpful in some cases when you want to farm select enemies.
These fights though, they are hard at first. One of the games main story missions takes you into a battle and it is hard at first if you are not familiar with dodging and combat they bring forth in the game. For me the first battle I failed several times as you cannot get out of battle to heal and are needing to take down tens of enemies in a row and if you die you restart the entire battle. There is an ability to heal and id highly recommend obtaining it first since it can be very beneficial in a lot of encounters throughout the game. After I failed about 5 times due to not being able to heal and improper timing to dodge attacks I went to explore a bit more of the map to train myself a bit and better familiarize with its combat system. In total from when I started the game to where I was able to finish that conquest battle was about 5 hours. After the 5thhour I was pretty solid when it came to dodging and fighting but there are a few instances where your skills will be put to the test.
Story Questlines:
Onto the story aspect, there are 3 main quest lines that encompass the games entire storyline. The first is about finding details about your past and family, second is dealing with the Cult who are essentially the templars before the templars were a thing and after you find the final cultist youll learn more about that aspect.
The third questline is one I did not find until I was 30 hours into the game. I was out and about exploring an island when I went down into a dungeon type area and there and behold is another major part of the story. This part requires you to find mythical beasts and take them out in order to obtain artifacts. This questline overlaps a bit with the modern day story but as stated above the modern day story is not focused on much and doesn’t present itself much at all just taking the backseat the entire time.
A short expansion on the first questline of finding more out about your family is that there are several endings to this part which are directly derived from the choices and interactions made in previous storyline related quests. I don’t want to say much more as to not spoil but there are versions considered good and others considered bad. I believe there are 7 total endings one can have.
With the Cultists, some can be found around the world and killed before you find out who they are, others are quest related and overlap with your family ones and for good reason that they explain. Then there are others that need side quests completed in order to gain clues about them before they are revealed. Hardest one would be the bottom right branch where you have to trigger a takeover and fight for either side and when the conquest is triggered he will appear and you’ll have to take him out. Most of the others are self-explanatory and are easy to find. I only had to look that one up but probably could have found it given I was willing to take the time to find him. I just was not interested in conquest battles much so didn’t do many of them.
Sound and Visuals:
With the sound, it is similar to many other games and content where it is good enough and not a very standout one but not one that is terrible either. It suits the game and compliments it well. I would say background music when exploring could trigger more often but that is more of a personal preference thing and would vary depending on who you ask. Having your own music on while exploring works just as good and was never a problem for me.
The visuals are gorgeous. The entire game requires some serious specs to max out but when it is, its one of the best games around for overall visuals. Nearly any spot you stop at and look around will be very detailed and look amazing. Quite a lot of places are screenshot worthy.
Visual glitches and the such were there but not that prominent and were kept under control for the most part. If one was specifically looking for places that did not look right with the way textures or objects where they would find them. I don’t expect this to be perfect and expected this to be the case as the games map is enormous. Even with a hundred-people spending a thousand hours finding and fixing places there will still be more that could make it just that much better visually. As time goes on and patches role out I believe we will see everything only looking better and more seamless.
Overall and Final Thoughts:
A bit of random stuff and things that don’t suit the main categories above ill plug down here. One of which is the fact that I have 100% the game but also have not. What I mean by that is I have completely cleared the map and beat every quest sort of. What I mean by that is there is 1 quest that is glitched and upon looking it up seems to be getting a patch. The quest I have the items for, but it is failing to trigger so I cannot truly clear it off my list and have a true 100% game.
When it comes to armor customization and damage you can deal. A person can craft a very heavy dps character with bows dealing in the hundreds of thousands of damage if you so choose. For me my playstyles usually revolve around up close and personal, so I went with a warrior damage boost along with burn since I live passive damage dealt to enemies while im fighting several people. I found it especially helpful when I was fighting in conquest battles. I would pop on fire weapons and run around igniting everybody and due to the armor specs, I had every tik would deal more than my base damage. The fire would last about 20 or so seconds and I boosted my crit chance up to 30%. The DOT damage also has the chance of criting. Basically, all armor perks would be towards fire buildup/damage/time, crit or warrior damage. Armor boosting perks I didn’t care for since I was good at dodging after a few hours of learning the ropes. Most fights I would encounter I dealt with by dodging to slow time for 3ish seconds, igniting a few people and focusing on the big guy as the others slowly fell all while I worked my way around the battlefield killing all enemies.
A fun way to pass the time is the spartan kick ability. Sometimes just for the fun of it id just corner a person over to the side of a cliff, even if they severely out leveled by, then if they were able to be, id simply kick them off and listen to them either scream slurs at me or yell. Oddly was very satisfying to do lol.
Along with people complaining about the quests being repetitive which was talked about above is people who complained about the amount of time it took to level up trying to tell others you needed to buy a payed for boost to your xp. That is simply not the case at all. There are 50 levels one can obtain from the base game and by hour 40 I had maxed myself out by simply playing the game the way it was intended to be. By that I mean I was exploring, completing forts, accepting any and all quests in my path and completing said quests as I explored and cleared parts of the map that had its quest objective on my natural path I decided to take. If a person solely wants to run through the story missions, they can and there is a difficulty for it labeled as casual where it clearly states it’s for people only wanting the story and don’t care about anything else. For the normal person playing through, they will not or at least should not have a problem when it comes to xp. I spent over half my playtime as a max level character. I sat there thinking this sucks I wish there were more levels I could aim for. Then by playtime hour 50 I had maxed all of my ship and other equipment. A majority of the game I was just clearing the map with nothing to aim for except the 100% mark. In origins by the time I completed the map I still had a tad bit of equipment crafting I needed to do which I found great as the games content coincided with its playtime very nicely. By the end, I had several thousand of each material and tens of tablets with nothing to spend them on.
Overall this game has a very good foundation with it expanding some aspects and retracting others. The world size being the biggest improvement. By the end the world started to feel lacking but that is because not all of the content provided was suitable for such an extended amount of time. If they brought back nd improved on bows, crafting, ships and equipment that they had done better in previous games mixed with this world and its special abilities, we would be in for potentially a perfect score game but as it stands now there is a very solid base but nowhere near enough to obtain such a score. If the next installment brought the ships from black flag, bows from origins, world map size from this game, story from 3 and customization from syndicate it would be simply put an amazing game… or at least has the potential of being one, with those aspects it would be hard for such a title to fail imo. (Given a story driven game fits the narrative, I find if it is a king wanting conquest and you are capturing land for your territory story quality of 3 would work but not necessary as that would be more about the journey to conquest and ruling.)
One last thing to note that a lot seem to overlook is the fact that you are playing as a mercenary and a mercenary will do anything for money be that a repeatable fetch quest, bounty or hit marker to gain more coin. To a mercenary, coin is everything and will be the driving force for them to such miniscule and tedious tasks, they don’t care about the challenge just the money.
Finally, DLC items are not a required or even essential part of the game, they can assist you, but I do not recommend them whatsoever, especially the passive xp boost which I cannot stress enough. The moment you get it and are quite a few hours in I can guarantee you’ll regret it and tire of the game rather quickly. XP is easily obtained If you play the way it is intended to be and that is as a true coin hunting mercenary. I would highly recommend this game to anybody that is into a more action RPG genre.
Overall Rating: 4/5 
